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found the charming set of blue and white dishes for our kitchen and the strangely hard to
find step-stool that has (literally) supported so many of our household projects.
But it was also here that we spent a sweaty quarter-hour looking for a spade for digging
in the garden before being told, “We don't have.”
Then there's
Bonano's
, the testosterone-driven hardware store on Route 200 just out-
side of Isabel. If Vieques were a high school, this is where the tough boys would hang out.
The staff is almost exclusively male and often abrupt. The aisles are dark and narrow,
and there's an indefinable air of menace about the whole place.
Hands down, this is my favorite of the three.
☼ ☼ ☼
Vieques has more corner stores than it has corners.
Well, not quite, but you get my point.
Our favorite,
El Encanto
, on Route 201 just beyond
Nales
, is a convenience store and
bar rolled into one.
I've often tried to imagine walking into our local 7-Eleven in D.C. at ten in the morning
and finding a group of middle-aged men and women sitting around drinking beer and gos-
siping with a jukebox blaring in the background.
Somehow it just doesn't compute.
And yet that's what you'll find at
Encanto
any day of the week.
The soft drinks and bagged ice are kept in the bar section of the store and the first few
times we ventured into that part of the establishment we didn't quite know what to expect.
After all, it was crammed full of people drinking, dancing, and generally whooping it up at
breakfast time.
Usually they just ignored us. But one morning they invited us to join them.
“Too early!” we cried.
They laughed at our abstemiousness and ordered another round.
Meanwhile, on Route 997 are two bodegas known to us, respectively, as the Store That
Has Everything and the Store That Has Nothing.
It's hard to imagine how the latter stays in business, since it has almost no stock. I sat
in the car one afternoon while Michael dashed into this particular
colmado
with a list of six
or eight staple items—toilet paper, milk, Windex. In other words, nothing remotely out of
the ordinary.
He was back in less than five minutes with a miniscule carton of milk bravely defying
its expiration date—and nothing more.
“What happened?” I asked.
“They didn't have anything on our list except milk,” he said in his matter-of-fact way.
“What do you mean?”
“Their shelves are almost literally bare.”
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